Heroic Chinese mother saved 30 children found dumped in the trash

JINHUA, ZHIEJIANG PROVINCE, China, July 30, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Although 88-year-old Lou Xiaoying may now be close to death, she will not soon be forgotten in her home city of Jinhua.

The Daily Mail on Monday recorded the astonishing story of the elderly woman, whose meager living recycling trash did not stop her from bringing home and caring for all the abandoned infants she came across - all 30 of them.

“I realised if we had strength enough to collect garbage, how could we not recycle something as important as human lives,” she said.

“These children need love and care. They are all precious human lives. I do not understand how people can leave such a vulnerable baby on the streets.”

Under China’s one-child policy parents must obtain a pregnancy permit or face severe penalties, and it is estimated that some 35,000 abortions are committed per day in the country - many of them forced. Investigations have revealed that human rights abuses under the policy are rampant, with family planning police often dealing with “illegal pregnancies” through forced abortions and infanticide.

The woman says her rescue effort began in 1972, when she found a little girl “lying amongst the junk on the street, abandoned.”

Today, Lou suffers from kidney failure, and pictures show her on a hospital bed, where two smiling children interact with her.

Her youngest child, seven-year-old Zhang Qilin, was found in a dustbin as an infant when Lou was 82 years old.

“Even though I was already getting old I could not simply ignore the baby and leave him to die in the trash. He looked so sweet and so needy. I had to take him home with me,” she said.

Last week, outrage shook the Internet when it was revealed a premature baby girl in Anshan city, Liaoning province, had been thrown in the trash with umbilical cord still attached, in a plastic bag with her throat cut. Doctors said she would have died of suffocation within minutes, and had the cut been any deeper, it would certainly have taken the baby girl’s life.

One fan quoted by the Daily Mail said that Lou’s remarkable charity to unwanted infants has put China’s Communist Party to shame and made her a local hero.

“She is shaming to governments, schools and people who stand by and do nothing. She has no money or power but she saved children from death or worse,” said the fan.